#4 went into some weird welfare-queen, kids-these-days, get-off-my-lawn territory.

The rest is solid.

4 or 5 most of the time

But just saying “which he named” would be less characters and make more sense

“Which himself named it”

Words good authoring there

Of course I know him — he’s me!

Capitalist dystopia got us comparing ingested calories per unit of art

“Yesturday”

I’m not against AI as a technology in principle, I’m no luddite.

Perhaps not a luddite, but a Luddite.

The actual followers of Ned Ludd weren’t opposed to technology. They were, in many cases, experts in the machinery — sometimes having built the machines they would later destroy.

They opposed the new social order that seemed to inevitably arrive with the machinery. The capitalists would make more money than before, the workers less, and also endure more dangerous working conditions.

Btw, your note about absorbing and repackaging counter-culture reminded me of Rebel Sell by Andrew Potter. There’s a good episode of You Are Not So Smart about it: https://youarenotsosmart.com/2012/10/08/yanss-podcast-episode-five

The author seems to have fallen for two tricks at once: The MPAA/RIAA playbook of seeing all engagement with content through the lens of licensing, and the AI hype machine telling everyone that someday they will love AI slop.

He mentions people complaining that stock photo sites, book portals, and music streaming services are all degrading in quality because of AI slop, but his conclusion is that people will start seeking out AI content because it’s not copyrighted.

Regardless… The position of those in power has not changed. They never believed in copyright as a guiding concept, only as a means to an end. That end being: We, the powerful, will control culture, and we will use it to benefit ourselves.

Before generative AI, the approach was to keep the cultural landscape well-groomed – something you’d wanna pay to experience. Mindfully grown and pruned, with clear walking paths, toll booths at each entrance, and harsh penalties for littering or stepping on the grass. You were allowed to have your own toll-free parks outside of the secure perimeter, that continue the walking paths in ways that are mutually beneficial, as long as visitors don’t track mud in as a result.

But now? The landscape is no longer about creating a well-manicured amusement park worth the price of admission. There’s oil under the surface. And it’s time to frack the hell out of it. It’s too bad about the toxic slurry that will accumulate up top, making the walled and unwalled parks alike into an intolerable biohazard. There are resources to extract. Externalities are an end-user problem.

Yeah, turning culture into an expensive amusement park was a horrible mistake. But I wouldn’t get too eager to gloat over seeing the tide of sludge pour over their walls. We’ll still be on the outside, drowning in it.

Join, pay, request chargeback from your card company.

When they dispute it: “The position clearly says unpaid. So I won’t pay.”

Use AI to expand this argument to 10 pages. Bonus points for citing nonexistent court decisions.

Sure, but if you’re specifically trying to go South, Spain is about the same latitude as most Canadian cities.

Time for Mexico?

US once again beaten by rest of world.

“We cannot give everyone a trial, because to do so would take, without exaggeration, 200 years,” he wrote. “We would need hundreds of thousands of trials for the hundreds of thousands of Illegals we are sending out of the Country. Such a thing is not possible to do. What a ridiculous situation we are in.”

I’ve noticed that Trump often does identify real issues. That’s what allows him to pitch insane, half-baked, and cruel solutions so successfully.

We haven’t had sufficient funding for processing asylum claims for decades upon decades, and the process itself is outdated, slow, and ineffective for the country and migrant alike.

We should be fixing that, instead of outsourcing death camps. But “doing paperwork better” is a pretty underwhelming pitch.

I used to have the same issue. Electric toothbrush helped. But I still wait anyway.

So Biden could’ve just said “Trump is an illegal immigrant” and sent him to a death camp?

We missed our fuckin shot.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

“Hey bro, nice sign but you forgot the E in rarely”

“Oh good catch, I’ll just squeeze it in”

They’re an ad company that just happens to offer search as a way to show ads.

Their ideal scenario is one where you search forever and never find what you were looking for.

Except gen AI didn’t exist when those people decided on their license. And besides which, it’s very difficult to specify “free to use, except in ways that undermine free access” in a license.